Max Heilman’s Top Metal Albums of 2024

This year has been well-saturated with all kinds of great heavy music. Regardless of your genre of preference, 2024 probably had something for you to enjoy. If you’re like me, and you enjoy a lot of different styles of metal, making a list can be tricky. As an enjoyer of anything from sludge, metalcore, and progressive black metal, I just accept that my lists don’t have any rhyme or reason to them.

If you’re familiar with one of these albums, great! It probably sounds nothing like the rest. This allows you to check out something different you might’ve missed out on! Black metal heads, embrace the slam riffs. Slamoholics, time to learn about real death metal (just kidding).

As if it needs to be said, this isn’t an attempt to highlight every good album that came out this year. This is just the stuff I enjoyed the most.

Reverorum Ib Malacht – Malakt Amalka Maryam

Swedish collective Reverorum Ib Malacht plays roman catholic black metal. If that’s already weird enough, listening to their music puts even the most evil-sounding bands to shame. From their unorthodox production value to their very orthodox imagery, these guys seem to approach black metal as a temple to cleanse all accessibility. Also in typical Malacht fashion, they released three albums on the same day this year. I’m choosing to highlight Malakt Amalka Maryam because it’s the best entry point to Malacht’s discography since Urkaos (2011).

Unlike the baffling nightmare fuel of albums like Vad är inte sju huvud? (2020), Malakt Amalka Maryam has riffs and grooves to latch onto within the gurgling cauldron of synthetic abstraction. 24-minute tracks aren’t exactly unheard of in experimental black metal, but it’s certainly refreshing to hear ideas that bring to mind the Scandinavian metal traditions instead of a confusing maze of sacred anti-music. The tormented vocals, melodious guitars, and pulsing drums would appeal to most atmospheric black metal fans. The more adventurous can make a try for the murky mysticism of Martyrium Matrimonii: Sacrificium Christi or the befuddling avant-garde textures of Svartsjuka Och Magi but it’s nice to know Malacht can still make a wonderfully depressive dirge of depressive, melodious black metal.

PeelingFlesh – The G Code

People can bitch about this Oklahoma export not being a true slam until they’re blue in the face, but PeelingFlesh understands the key tenets of great modern slam death metal — don’t take it too seriously, keep it ignorant, and know how to use samples well. This is exactly why The G Code Works so well. The slam parts are flawlessly executed, but the way these guys incorporate the best aspects of underground hip-hop into their sound is simply unparalleled in the history of this genre.

It’s not just your average hard-ass line from a gangster movie or a rap-beat intro. These guys cut and chop and screw gangsta rap into their stuff to a point where it almost seems like hip-hop and slam should just become the new standard for the scene. Add to that dashes of beatdown hardcore, and you have the perfect crossover album to bring together fans of thuggish swagger of all kinds. Slam is gangsta rap. Deal with It.

Boundaries – Death Is Little More

It’s been a big year for metalcore, with bands of various levels of quality making major waves in the mainstream. You already know about Knocked Loose and Bad Omens. I don’t need to tell you what to think about them. Instead, I’ll make sure anyone who hasn’t checked out what Connecticut up-and-comers Boundaries dropped this year. Death Is Little More comes packed with the best of multiple eras and styles of metalcore, with a great balance of noisy hatred and catchy hooks.

Where 2022’s Burying Brightness took an overtly melodic approach to metalcore, this outing brings a harsher, more menacing vibe. Akin to dark metalcore bands like End, Boundaries doesn’t let raw intensity interfere with the clarity of their vision. The breakdowns feel as vibrant as the riffier passages, while the vocals have much more of an animalistic snarl. And yet, the clean vocals manage to cut through the mix at just the right times — not for pop appeal, but for emotional impact. This is exactly what metalcore should be. Raw and aggressive, yet tight and thoughtful. Fans of, well, any era of this genre had better jump on board if they haven’t already.

Ulcerate – Cutting The Throat of God

New Zealand’s Ulcerate have been making progressive blackened death metal for a while now, and have remained remarkably awesome throughout their career. This same can be said about their latest effort, but this time they did a great job of elevating tenets many might associate with generic black metal.

Yes, an album title like Cutting The Throat of God might bring to mind the tired edginess of many a corpse-painted teen, but these guys understand how to take these hallmarks and supercharge them with expressive, impressionistic collages of hellish sonics. While certainly as cerebral as one would expect from ulcerate, this also features the most infectious leads of their career. Having those morsels of accessibility in an otherwise unforgiving wilderness helps show the band’s worth as songwriters as well as wicked experimentalists.

Civerous – Maze Envy

After slugging it out in the West Coast underground, Civerous has delivered an album worthy of the hype they’ve received this year. Maze Envy is a combination of pretty much every subgenre of death metal, but not for the sake of chaos. They simply have too many unique riffs up their sleeve to stick to one style.

It takes a special band to span brutal death and funeral doom in one album, much less cavernous death and even some slam-ish parts. But that’s exactly what Civerous does. They simultaneously sound like students of the game, in that their ideas stem from from a respect for the history of extreme music, but they also charge each song with the tenacity and hungriness of a band that wants to make a difference in the scene.

Thou – Umbilical

Thou is a band not exactly known for switching up their formula, but when they do, it’s always worth checking out. This year’s switch-up comes in the form of a surprisingly violent take on sludge metal. Umbilical is far less doomy than the customary Thou release — not to say that they’ve gone full powerviolence. Suffice it to say that this is closer to the sludgecore camp than the apocalyptic blues camp.

This angrier, moshier side of Thou comes as a welcome surprise. Their riffs remain as crushing as ever, driven by a more excitable rhythm structure. This increased temp also gives the vocals a more urgent vocation for their glass-gargling delivery. It’s pissed off, it’s heavy as hell, and it maintains the wold-weariness of Louisiana sludge mainstays.